Talk:Land Vehicles/@comment-122.106.128.207-20131111032139/@comment-4391208-20131111060124
If you can keep it supplied with ammo. It really depends on what kind of technology you're feeding into the gun. Old technology in the 1980s to 1999 can't maintain sustained fire with a single gun; overheating (especially important, because swapping barrels on a gun piece is hell), wear and tear, and some gun systems being manual. There are mobile artillery that can rapid-fire, however. The PzH 2000 is the best example of that, being able to reach 10 - 13 rounds per minute. It is still vulnerable to overheating, however, so sustaining that rate-of-fire for longer periods is still unfeasible. And with artillery, the reason why they need to fire in a stable position is because of the recoil from their firing. With their range, they need the power to chuck the round that far, and there are alot of factors that can screw them up; a mobile gun firing while moving might snap its suspension depending on firing rate and ground conditions. It used to be that towed artillery would sink into mud every time it fired if it was an especially bad day for the team; or worse, they could get stuck even before setting up, because the gun by itself isn't particularly light. While it's nigh impossible for a mobile gun to actually get trapped in mud, the recoil of firing would still be able to push it off-course. Multiple barrels, considering the size of a barrel that can fit a 108mm round (the inner circumference would only be slightly smaller than an average-sized human head), would call for a heavier chassis to accomodate all the loader systems and gun parts, which would in turn require a wider drive and suspension system to be used. There's also enlarging the powerplant, and it would require four sets of three gun barrels each during maintanence. I assume your firing is automated. Depending on what rate of fire you intend to have, the system itself would have to withstand at least one gun barrel going off per second. Mobile guns carry a store of their own ammunition as well, so that's more weight on it. It would be a vehicle roughly the size of the Maus if you wanted to keep it mobile, and because of all the mass, speed and mobility is restricted. And if a malfunction happens in one barrel (eg. due to the constant recoil), the entire machine is liable to go off. Artillery's purpose, especially during WWII, was to open holes in enemy formations. Nowadays it's all about precision strikes, but against the BETA, there is no such thing as precision strike, because of a) their numbers and b) the Laser-class, which are able to shoot down artillery shells. It's why humanity uses AL shells and warheads to saturate the area in anti-laser heavy metal particles, so that they can follow up with a culling wave of actual shells, and hopefully open up a large-enough hole in the front formation for TSFs to slip through and kill the Lasers behind, which are likely to be unharmed; the particles just make it harder for the beam to transmit through the air, thus reducing its range, and doesn't actually prevent the Laser-class from firing. Each shot will burn through any particulates in the air. Artillery seldom gets a chance to enage the Lasers directly anyways; their gun range of 40km~60km means that they need to stay within a certain range, but at the same time, they can't stray too close to the front so as to avoid being overrun by BETA.